Hacker News Reader

Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

So we curb emissions by building a bunch of new A/C units? Sorry, that's silly.

CO2 is just one of many many forms of pollution. Think you're doing your part by purchasing a hybrid or electric vehicle? There are barrels of oil that go into those tiers, the plastics, not to mention all the pollution that goes into battery production. If your car is fuel efficient, the best thing you can do for the environment is drive it until the wheels fall off. When you do need to purchase a replacement, get a used hybrid or electric.

Climate change/CO2 is not the problem. It's the symptom of rampant consumerism. We can't buy and purchase our way out of destroying the planet. We have to consume less, build cell phones that are upgradable and last a decade instead of 2 ~ 3 years. Companies need to be praised for smaller factories and lower sales for products that cost more and last longer.

That is a very very huge shift in the way we think. I'm not sure if it's even remotely feasible or what it would take to convince people, industry, the world to simply consume less.

View on HN

I think your thinking is a little short sighted. Yes, on a 20 year horizon replacing our existing inefficient stuff is wasteful. But on a 100 year time horizon, population will rise to 10 billion, and we'll turn over almost all of our climate systems.

What I would propose is we start now thinking about what sustainable architecture looks like, and start trying to imagine more permanent cultural edifices. I.e. permaculture. I don't think we need to worry too much about the ecological cost of replacing our current physical plant with a permaculture one--the ecological costs of transition are dwarfed by the ecological savings we will reap over 100 years.

That said, we should either go big (final stage permaculture) or not try at all. There's no sense in half measures at this point, we either build communities 100x more efficient, or we do as you say: make do with the stuff we have.

What do you mean by efficient?

I think you and the GP are on the same page, just coming from different angles. You say we need to change communities; how do you do that without first changing the culture? Why do people want to live in suburbs? I don't know how to do it, but if there is enough demand for more efficient lifestyles I believe the market will meet it.

Because most large cities (at least in America) are loud, cramped, polluted, with horrible traffic and hit-and-miss public transportation, the schools are usually worse, and if you want space for even minor luxuries like a small workshop for personal projects, home office, rec-room, or other standard features of a typical middle-class American house, you better be willing to pay through the nose for it. Paying through the nose goes for just about everything else in the city as well. Plus you won't get to use your personal property as an investment, because you likely won't have any living in a city.

Add in a lot of NIMBY residents who don't want any new residents moving into their neighborhoods, good luck making the city appealing to anyone who doesn't REALLY want to live there, or else has some business opportunity that makes living in the city worth their while.

Here in the states IMO we'd do better by making suburban lifestyles more efficient. Between electric cars, renewables and more efficient tech of all stripes coming around there's no reason we shouldn't be able to get suburban houses down to carbon-neutral. The amount of transformation major cities would have to undergo to appeal to suburban populations is just unrealistic by comparison.

> Here in the states IMO we'd do better by making suburban lifestyles more efficient.

That makes me sad, because when I envision suburbia, it involves all the NIMBYism (especially in the form of HOAs) you mentioned above, combined with distances that make using a bicycle for transportation unrealistic. I actually enjoy riding my bicycle to and from work (and the grocery store). I would dread a commute in a vehicle of even 30 minutes.

Depends on the suburb. Some are indeed the HOA-from-hell fiefdoms that'll slap you with fines for your lawn being an inch above regulation, or boot/tow cars that park on the street without a pass. Those suck. And if you're not near a major population center you run the risk of there just being nothing to do/no real career prospects in town. But as someone who grew up in a suburb and has lived in several, in my experience people tend to keep to themselves so long as no one's being a bother.

A bike to work isn't necessarily out of the question either if you live just outside a major city. Some areas have bike trails that can take you quite a distance. But yeah in most cases you'll need a car for virtually everything, that is a downside. My personal commute is only 10 minutes, but I know people who commute up to 1 hour if they work downtown (morning rushour is a bitch).

Culture is everything that outlasts us: buildings, language, tools, social calendars, contracts, habits, etc.

Changing the buildings is changing the culture. You identify a complete resource cycle, like a weekly grocery habit, and design a replacement. Drop it in, look for another one.

Demand is a trailing indicator. Significant demand for integrated permaculture living won't happen until long after the concept is proven and started scaling.

The current situation is largely caused by artificially low prices of fossil fuels. We are borrowing from the future to fuel our consumption.

If we agreed to increase those prices by, say, 5 to 10 times and used the money to fund research towards removing carbon from the atmosphere, the world would become a much better place. Problem is, everybody is afraid of the shock this would cause and everybody thinks only about his little square of the woods.

In Poland, the government recently announced they want to add +0.25 PLN ($0.07, or ~6% of current gasoline prices) of tax for gasoline. The stated reason is increasing the budgets for maintenance of local roads.

Regardless of the issues of stated vs. real reasons, the reaction of people in the country was totally predictable: people are enraged. How dares the government raise the fuel price? You get a similar reaction if you try to suggest an emission tax to any driver.

With this mindset, sadly, we won't get anywhere.

Europe already has gasoline prices that are 2x to 2.5x higher than in the US. So compared to US, Europe has already gotten somewhere.

Carbon taxes are the way to go.

Why? Because they allow governments to set policy empirically. You can raise the tax a little, bit-by-bit, until you start seeing negative effects. Carbon taxes allow a legislature of non-economists to procedurally find the maximum reduction that the economy can bear, which is good, because obviously you don't want more than that, and given the nature of the situation you probably don't want less.

The difference between this and a cap-and-trade model is that with cap-and-trade, there's a lot of money tied up in the carbon shares allocated, so lowering the cap is politically impossible. Big corporations like it because they have an easier time acquiring carbon credits than small companies, because they have political influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_emission_trading#Incent...

Cap-and-trade worked with other kinds of emissions because those emissions are less common and come only from certain industries, whereas carbon comes from everywhere. As such, it wasn't possible for the acid rain producers to lobby Congress to raise the cap on NOx. Or to not lower it. Furthermore, the market is small enough that it was possible for charitable organizations to make a dent by buying emissions allowances and "retiring" them -- which is extremely unlikely to matter for carbon given the size of the carbon market.

Carbon taxes are fairer and simpler, and it's harder for a company to weasel out. Some observers have suggested that an industry could lobby to be exempt, but this seems unlikely: how many industries have successfully exempted themselves from income tax? From VAT? By contrast, this happened:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carbon-credits-sy...

> a diplomatic cable published last month by the WikiLeaks website reveals that most of the CDM projects in India should not have been certified because they did not reduce emissions beyond those that would have been achieved without foreign investment. Indian officials have apparently known about the problem for at least two years.

>[...] Today, more than 720 Indian projects have been approved and have gained some 120 million tonnes' worth of carbon credits, a large fraction of the 750 million tonnes issued since 2005 (see 'Cleaning up').

> Yet on the evidence of discussions at the meeting, most of the carbon-offset projects in India fail to meet the CDM requirements set by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

I've got a 1996 Toyota 4Runner; it's paid off and I do put it's 4WD capabilities to use, but normally I pay for gas to carpool with someone else with a more fuel efficient vehicle to drive to trailheads for hiking and climbing. Otherwise I try to bicycle commute to and from work, including hitting the grocery store (which is on the way home from work). It's a pleasant commute, in part because I have a shower available at work, but more importantly because I picked a residence as close as possible to work, using this:

https://www.freemaptools.com/how-far-can-i-travel.htm

It is a big shift in thinking, but consider this: most work schedules see people driving between the same two places twice a day, five times a week. Reducing that distance can give you back considerable time, not to mention reducing costs (even if you drive) and reducing stress. And before someone counters with the inevitable "I don't get paid enough", you should be getting paid enough to live as close to work as possible, or they should let you telecommute. It's also arguable you can afford to live closer to work:

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-c...

This is a cultural problem that goes beyond just consumerism (although that's the elephant in the room) to things like corporate culture. I'm also still using a Nokia N900, but every year I more and more feel the pull to jump to an Android phone. Having a hardware keyboard for Emacs+org-mode is quite handy, though.

CO2, and its interchangeably-used measure of CO2e (which is a sum of all greenhouse gases weighted based on how much they contribute to global warming) is the only pollutant that matters in this context.

Our disposable-good society is a small fraction of our overall impact on the climate. It is 100% possible to power our world with solar, wind, and batteries while keeping the rest of our lives largely unchanged. The only climate-hostile things we can't easily solve for right now are a) beef and b) air travel. Every single HN reader can go all-electric today, and most can sign up for a renewable-energy program through their utility.

If you think our society should build fewer, higher-quality goods then I agree. But doing that won't come close to stopping climate change.

Air travel? Sure, that ones hard to fix, but we have had a solution for years which would drastically reduce the environmental harm done by cattle farming - eating plant-based foods instead of beef.

Hobson's choice.

The problem is though, that many vegetarian options are soy-based, which are pretty much all grown abroad, and have an large environmental impact there. It also requires a LOT more land to grow the same amount of plant-based proteins than meat, which for example results in local farmers in South America burning rain-forest, only to farm 'environmently friendly' soy.

So no, plant-based foods alone is not the holy grail, and also not realistic to force this upon people in the first place. In my opinion, what should happen is that the relatively new plant-based hamburgers which are very very similar to meat would gradually replace the 'mass market' meat for things like fastfood restaurants. But that on it's own isn't enough, we need better production methods for these plants too, so we don't have huge transportation pollution.

And airtravel is not the only big issue, large container-ships are a much bigger problem. Once in international waters, many switch to burning very dirty oil, instead of 'clean' diesel which they only use in local waters to comply with emission norms. Not only that, ships are built to last for decades, and companies won't convert them to full electric without economic incentives.

Reducing the number of humans could be one approach. The idea causes rancorous response from religious people who believe God told us to be fruitful and multiply. To reduce births might require coercion, it's true, but it would not require killing people or making them suffer. I don't see how else we can continue to enjoy the benefits and power of technology while keeping the planet habitable and enjoyable.

>To reduce births might require coercion, it's true, but it would not require killing or people or making them suffer.

The demographic shift of increasing the number of retirees per healthy adult will definitively cause suffering. There's a reason why Millennials are putting off having children - they can't afford to.

Well, not while buying avocado toast.

Coercion doesn't mean suffering to you but it might to others. The world can support more if everyone consume less.

Every time I see this suggested I am reminded of Idocracy. Only some people will choose not to reproduce. The genes of those who disagree with this idea will be the genes passed on to later generations. One could also assume that the opposing ideas regarding reproduction are also more likely to be passed on. I don't really see this as a viable voluntary solution.

If not voluntary, how could a place do this without instituting something like a 'one child' policy?

Wealthy nations already seem to have topped out on population growth, and now grow only through immigration. It could be that when societies reach a certain level of development they naturally produce fewer than two children per family.

As other nations continue to grow and industrialize, the issue then doesn't really go away. It seems that the problem would just move around the globe until we hit critical mass. The only solutions I see to this issue are to be more efficient with the resources we do have and/or move to another planet and start the process over again. Since moving to another planet is not something we will likely be able to do with billions of people in the short term, conserving resources and reducing consumption seem to be a more reachable goal.

If it is true that industrialization reduces bithrate below 2 per family, the issue would go away as other nations industrialize. If the whole world industrialized and reduced birthrate below 2, we'd reduce population and hence consumption. I'm not understanding your "critical mass" argument.

> As other nations continue to grow and industrialize, the issue then doesn't really go away.

Sure it does, as each national industrializes it solves part of the problem; when they all do it, problem gone.

> It seems that the problem would just move around the globe until we hit critical mass.

You really haven't thought this through.

I can see why you'd think that. However, industrialization does not occur overnight. > You really haven't thought this through. I don't know why you would say this. Do you think that Earth will never reach a point where its population exceeds the planet's capacity to support it?

Where will the problem move to when every nation is industrialized?

The United States has basically already solved this problem. Just make housing, healthcare, and college tuition incredibly expensive so no one can afford to have more than a small number of children.

You realize the world's birth rate has already been on the decline for decades, correct? And in general, the bulk of this occurred not because of coercion, but because of economic development and the ensuing shifts in optimum family strategy.

Yes but I can't say for sure the cause is economic development. It seems likely, but it's a correlation, not a proven cause.

When you say "birth rate is falling" its effectively the second derivative on "number of people" right? As in, if we have go from 2 children born per person to 1.5 children born per person, we are still growing the number of people.

Even if "children per person" falls slow enough you could even indefinitely increase the rate that new people are added right?

That's right, but note that the replacement rate depends on mortality rates and any gender-bias for either birth or mortality. Generally birth rates below 2.1 are consider "sub-replacement", but it can be much higher in some locales (due to disease, war, etc). Here are some per-continent population projections:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_(UN...

(Interestingly, the above chart was created about 10 years ago; I do wonder how accurate it's been.)

I said children per family, not per person.

I don't really understand the distinction: fewer children per family is the same thing as fewer per person right? Like if you have 1.4 children per person on average that means exactly 2.8 children per adult man + woman?

All I meant to point out is that "birth rate falling" doesn't map to "population falling", if the average number of children per couple drops 2.5 to 2.1 then each generation is still larger (and the population still grows exponentially).

Yeah, it has to fall below 1.0 child per person for the population to decline. And it's commonly reported that is happening in developed countries.

In fact, the world already hit "peak child" some years ago. The number of children in the world has stopped increasing. That means that the world's population is now only growing because of life expectancy increases and not because of increased numbers of people being born.

The population will continue to grow for a while because of developing countries' life expectancy catching up with developed countries, but unless there are drastic technological breakthroughs to improve life expectancy beyond where developed countries are now, the world population will stop growing fairly soon.

Even if we curbed consumerism our current appliances, infrastructure, agriculture and transportation still gobble up large amount of energy / emit carbon. They will need to be replaced one way or another.

Nobody is proposing we magically manufacture billions of new units of everything tomorrow and kick out all the stuff we purchased yesterday.

Turnover takes years or decades anyway. Just like the EU did not make possession of incandescent light bulbs illegal, they just mandated that all new ones sold beyond a certain date must meet energy efficiency standards that can't be met by incandescent ones.

> We have to consume less, build cell phones that are upgradable and last a decade instead of 2 ~ 3 years.

Cars already last more than a decade. As long as moore's law is not entirely dead cell phones will be obsolete simply by advances in the underlying hardware and software exploiting those hardware advances, you don't even need planned obsolescence for that.

And ultimately it depends on the individual product whether it requires more energy to build or during its lifetime. Without checking I bet a space heater will burn significantly more energy during its operation than manufacture, and replacing it with a heat pump would be a net gain at almost any point in its lifecycle.

I feel like the focus on global warming and the fact that it's 'controversial' or there's a 'debate' distracts from concrete, proven issues with fossil fuel consumption: toxic air, water and soil pollution related to both extraction and use.

The irony is that consuming less actually leads to increased levels of happiness. If this was more widely appreciated the shift away from consumerism would be easier. I could imagine, for example, some kind of enlightened country/culture that actually intentionally contracts their economy because they've wised up to what really matters.

This is complete bogus because it frames 'rampant consumerism' in the frame of '20th century rampant consumerism' without giving thought to consuming sustainable products. It is possible to produce every single product that does not burn hydrocarbons in a completely carbon and waste neutral manner. So why don't we focus on producing enormous quanities of goods in a sustainable way? That's the real task. The way OP thinks is the same way of thinking that leads to 'overpopuplation is a problem' conclusions; We can fit enormous numbers of humans on the planet, we just need to engineer our living environments to be completely neutral to the environment. And that's not impossible. So what is the big idea with trying to get people to stop using products?

Hans Rosling has a take on this: The Magic Washing Machine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZoKfap4g4w&vl=en

> When you do need to purchase a replacement, get a used hybrid or electric.

Now all we need is someone to manufacture used cars, since nobody buys new in this utopia.

Edit: to the downvoters: I guess I have to spell it out for you, but my point was that building efficient A/C units makes sense because eventually someone somewhere has to buy new.

You might not realize this, but you're advocating keeping people in the developing world poorer than people in the West.

Actually livestock farming produces from 20% to 50% of all man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

Hi, I was wondering if you have any concrete data for this? I don't think it's true but I'll believe it if I can see some studies or data on it.

Sure, you can check this:

http://www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/Livestock%20and%20Climat...

Rampant consumerism is the exploitative pyramid scheme that's made the U.S. (and really the entire west and the part of the world that mimicks its economics in some form or other) wealthy.

There's no possible way U.S. or global plutocracy is going to be kind and look the other way at attempts to shrink their economy. They'd sooner see the world burn.

I think what it would take, is a genome change. We'd need to be a different species. Perhaps inheritable memory so each generation isn't always forgetting the violence of their ancestors.

You're getting downvoted but you're basically correct. Notice how human civilization is dictated by a four-generation cycle like Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring. We're in the Summer/Fall transition and we will soon be entering the Winter right now. But if the baby boomers, Gen X and Millenials could have some genetic memory of WW1, the Great Depression and WW2, then we might not be in this situation.

It sounds like a milder version of the situation in Childhood's End (in the sense of humanity essentially birthing an alien race that will live in utopia, but dying off itself).

It's a creative re-framing of the problem, though. From "how do we force humans to behave better" to "what do humans need to be, in order to behave better".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com